Democrats/Lean Democratic current conditions assessment is relative insensitive to Trump being president, and statistically significantly related to news sentiment. Republican/Lean Republican perception is overwhelmingly associated with whether Trump is president.
Figure 1: Overall current conditions assessment (bold black, left scale), Democratic (blue, left scale), Independent (chartreuse, left scale), and Republican (red, left scale), SF Fed news sentiment index (green, right scale).
UMCURRDEM = 89.3*** + 1.86TRUMP + 50.6***NEWSSENTIMENT
standardized coefficients: 0.051 0.479
Adj-R2 = 0.21, SER = 16.5
UMCURRREP = 61.6*** + 50.7***TRUMP + 28.2***NEWSENTIMENT
standardized coefficients: 0.804 0.157
Adj-R2 = 0.64, SER = 18.9
The “impact” of news sentiment on Democratic perceptions is nearly ten times that of Trump. For Republicans, Trump is about five times impactful as news sentiment.
That’s apparently true for Republican perceptions of the Secretary of State, same as for news in general. Sample of one, though.